Seven Ways to Create a Green Office

After being named ‘World’s most improbable Green City’ by National Geographic in 2017, Dubai has now taken an aggressive step forward into making the country more sustainable by reducing the overall carbon footprint by 2050.

Xerox has been committed to helping governments and organisations to achieve their sustainability goals. They have come up with seven points that can help convert an office or an entire country significantly more sustainable –

  1. Use a print driver that makes sustainable printing easy. Adjust your print driver default settings to print on both sides of the sheet. This process is also known as duplexing.
  2. Select energy-efficient printers and multifunction printers that bear the EPA Energy Star and EPEAT labels. Print multiple images per page and print only the quantity you need at the time you need it.
  3. Choose innovative printing technologies. Some toners offer sharp image quality, exceptional reliability and low total cost of ownership. It reduces the amount of toner needed for printing a page and requires lower fuser temperature. That means reduced electricity consumption and CO2 emissions compared to conventional toner.
  4. Recycle office paper, and print on recycled papers or FSC certified paper. So many trees are cut every year to create paper or paper-based products. According to the University of Indiana,
    “Each ton (2000 pounds) of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil, three cubic yards of landfill space, 4000 kilowatts of energy, and 7000 gallons of water. This represents a 64% energy savings, a 58% water savings, and 60 pounds less of air pollution!”
    Also, recycling will reduce your company’s disposal costs significantly.
  5. Automate your workflow as much as possible. By turning manual, paper-based processes into efficient, digital ones, you’ll save paper, time and money and reduce the number of errors. 
  6. Educate your employees about the impacts of their printing habits.
  7. Implement secure printing to hold print jobs at the device. Until a user enters a PIN to claim a printout, the document will not be printed. A time-out feature deletes unclaimed jobs. This prevents forgotten prints from piling up at the device and enables employees to cancel print orders should they change their mind about printing a file.

Xerox believes that once you become an eco-friendly brand, you will notice how your behaviours affect the environment. By adopting these 7 steps, we can all take a step into making our workplace and also our country, that much closer to sustainability.